Citadel

by Martha Sprackland

Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca - Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite 'I' - part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet - brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects - the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light - make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2020

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only realized afterwards that the author is the twentysomething daughter of another poet whose work (both poetry and prose) I have read and enjoyed before, Jean Sprackland. It’s been nearly seven years since I read J. Sprackland’s poetry, so I can’t make general observations on a familial style but found this to be a memorable debut drenched in Spanish imagery and language from time spent living in Madrid. The references to sixteenth-century history meant little to me, so I just thought of Juana as a character or an alter ego. The writing about landscapes (Merseyside/the Irish Sea in addition to Spain) is crystalline and the alliteration produces entrancing rhythms. Birds and insects often provide the metaphors. I especially liked “Falconry,” “Hunterian Triptych” (about specimens in jars, human and non-), and “Mercy,” in which the speaker, bored of ejecting insect pests from the house daily, resorts to killing them and wishes a cruelly uncommunicative lover would similarly put [her] out of [her] misery. A good discovery from the Costa Award shortlist.

[Annikky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most accessible of poetry collections - I was very grateful to the blurb that gave me some context, would have been entirely lost otherwise, I suspect. But I really liked the idea of a link between two women (the author and Juana of Castile) across time and space.

[Jack Mckeever · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martha Sprackland has been a staple on the European poetry scene for a few years now. As she spends her time between London and Madrid - and given her role as one of the co-founders of the multilingual arts journal La Errante - 'Citadel', her debut poetry collection, feels like it encompasses all her wisdom and cross-cultural nuance, while never straying too far from the ragged beauty of her childhood Merseyside home. And she's landed at a sprint.

Weaving a narrative that combines 16th-century Spanish monarch Juana De Castille and Sprackland's modern experience of womanhood, the collection ebbs and flows, blurring time and memory together and using them to depict a ravaging relationship with identity, confinement, the sea, men, love and femininity.

'Beautiful Game' references the seismic shifts in time between the two protagonists, as well as the fact that in their relationship with wider society, nothing has really changed. 'Melr' is the most beautiful poem I've read for some time, sitting perfectly in a prism somewhere between Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage, as though they're battling for growth, beauty and grimness. in 'Lullaby' she connects names and places and allows the structural space around them to speak their meaning, and in 'Confession, in Anticipation of an Orthognathic Surgery' she presents physicality and the search for meaning in it as 'a devotion as hopeless as any other'.

Youthful UK poetry is in rude health right now, but so far, 'Citadel' is the high water mark for 2020.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this.

It's an interesting structure. Two voices, two separate 'I's'. One is the poet, one is a Juana of Castile aka Joanna the Mad. Their stories twisting together. Their stories, geographically and temporarily divided, intersect. Themes echo backward and forward. Numerous objects and images return again and again. The two I noticed most were eggs and blue flashing light, the latter of which I always took to be the light on an emergency vehicle.

These aren't 'easy' poems, but they are not impossible to understand. Sometimes you might need to read one again. Sometimes they play with form, but there isn't any abstraction here. It is more illustrative.

I particularly liked 'Melr', which is the longest poem in the collection; 'Falconry', 'Pimentos de Padron', 'Huntarian Triptych', 'Sports Metaphor'; 'Aquarium'; 'The Perfect Wife'; 'Dappled Things' and 'Mercy',

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The walls of the mind are deep and moated.” Martha Sprackland’s iridescent debut Citadel weaves a remarkable tapestry of poems both biographical and (quasi-? semi-?)autobiographical. Through the figures of Juana and Martha, a centuries-old Spanish queen and a modern poet, Sprackland blurs distinction with her all-encompassing ‘I’, a narrative voice that covers such a spread of time, events, and feeling, to map out traumas and anguish and all the geographies that connect and separate them. The attention to detail is never less than breathtaking, rhythmic and ascendant in poems like ‘Vitrine of Tektites and Fulgurites’ and ‘Still Life Moving’, then bold and grounded in ‘They Admit Each Other To The Inquisitor’ and ‘Juana and Martha in Therapy’, my dark favourite from the collection, which perfectly encapsulates the themes and concept of the wider collection, a microcosmic citadel of imagery and identity. The poems move towards the vague or inconsistent back-and-forth of ‘Transcript’, the final poem, which insists upon experiential gaps as much as it does reinforcing the bridges between Juana and Martha’s lives that traverse the collection.

[Jennifer Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental and mysterious. It is filled with surprises for the reader. I enjoy the way the poet unravel the complexity of her thoughts.